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Orr’s “Love It or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution”. HMXP 102 Dr. Fike. David W. Orr. Like Naess, Orr was heavily influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . Orr is the chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College in Ohio.

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Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, page 228: "The Cartesian approach to the human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate collection of resources that we can exploit however we like; and this fundamental misperception has led us to our current crisis.

“One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct--a thesis now called ‘mind-body dualism.’ He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other.”

Par. 7: “Francis Bacon provided the logic, and the evolution of government-funded research did the rest.”

“To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed an entirely new system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal would be the production of practical knowledge for ‘the use and benefit of men’ and the relief of the human condition.”

What do you make of the obvious connection to Swimme, “the sophisticated cultivation of dissatisfaction”?

Swimme: “But at a deeper level, what we need to confront is a power of the advertiser to promulgate a worldview, a mini-cosmology, that is based upon dissatisfaction and craving” (par. 6).

Orr:

Par. 7: “Sixth, biophobia required the sophisticated cultivation of dissatisfaction, which could be converted into mass consumption.”

Par. 10: “Beneath each of these endeavors lies a barely concealed contempt for unaltered life and nature, as well as contempt for the people who are expected to endure the mistakes, purchase the results, and live with the consequences, whatever those may be. It is a contempt disguised by terms of bamboozlement, like bottom line, progress, needs, costs and benefits, economic growth, jobs, realism, research, and knowledge, words that go undefined and unexplained.

Par. 16: People “must come to see their bondage as freedom and their discontents as commercially solvable problems.”

Does the principle of repression apply to environmentalism? If we continue to repress nature, will it bite us on the backside?

Here is Jesus, speaking in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Is this true or false as regards the environment?

Cf. technology in the Aliens movies. The monster is the thing that is repressed.

“But I think it was chiefly the plastic [that was at fault in the death of the ant colony on display in Manhattan], which seems to me the most unearthly of all man’s creations so far. I do not believe you can suspend army ants away from the earth, on plastic, for any length of time. They will lose touch, run out of energy, and die for lack of current” (The Lives of a Cell 26).

“Yet the danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with the life and breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like—and is then amazed that cowsheds ‘smell,’ because the dictionary didn’t say so.”